Flight Control Design and Optimization Tools

The design, simulation, integration, and flight testing of flight control systems for modern aircraft constitutes a series of challenging multidisciplinary tasks that factor significantly in the overall time and cost of aircraft development.

CIFER® (Comprehensive Identification from FrEquency Responses), a system identification tool based on a comprehensive frequency-response approach that is uniquely suited to the difficult problems associated with flight test data analysis.

CONDUIT® (CONtrol Designer's Unified InTerface), a state-of-the-art flight control design and optimization tool that allows the user to rapidly evaluate and optimize designs against relevant performance specifications and design criteria.

RIPTIDE (Real-time Interactive Prototype Technology Integration Development Environment), a high fidelity desktop simulation tool which provides a platform for rapid piloted simulation evaluation of the control law design.

Key Advantages of the Toolset:

Unique and integrated design environment that seamlessly brings together all relevant engineering disciplines under one common modeling platform.

Offers potential for significant reduction in time and cost of design, optimization, and simulation of modern flight control systems.

Fielding UAS and optionally-piloted systems bears an additional cost in developing algorithms to automate the flight control of these systems partially or entirely.

libOFN (Obstacle Field Navigation) is a software library that provides real-time sensor-based terrain avoidance and can be integrated into existing autonomous vehicle platforms.

libSLAD (Safe Landing Area Determination) is a software library that allows for rapid determination of safe landing areas based on terrain roughness, slope, proximity to obstacles, and other metrics.